What a big question! The complexity of thinking, the hard work of thinking …
Neuroscience is very popular as a rationale for why we should be paying more attention to children’s development and the social, cultural and environmental factors that support healthy and active development. It certainly helps us to understand the bigger picture. Enjoy this article designed for parents but also of interest to kaiako:

Within the strand of exploration in Te Whāriki, the examples of practices for infants, toddlers and young children (pp. 48-49) and considerations for leadership (p. 50) prompt kaiako to think about the environments and engagementsthatencourage curiosity, exploration and working theories to flourish.

In this post I highlight some of the suggested reflective questions on p. 50 to focus attention on ways working theories can be identifiably present in curricular environment set-ups, planning, learning and responsive engagements:

»How might kaiako make thoughtful decisions about which of children’s spontaneous play, interests and working theories might be used to create curriculum experiences?

»In what ways can real tools (such as gardening tools, saws, microscopes) be used confidently for exploration that leads to meaningful learning and sense making?

»How might kaiako encourage children to see a range of strategies they might adopt for exploration, thinking, reasoning and problem solving?

»What domain knowledge would help kaiako to recognise, respond to and extend children’s generation and refinement of working theories?

»What opportunities exist for children to participate in longer-term projects that support the development of their working theories?

I hope these questions are provoking critical thought by individual kaiako and reflective discussions in teaching teams as they get to know and use the revised Te Whāriki. I welcome any responses to these questions as comments on this blog post and look forward to hearing from you.

Rather like a blog post, or indeed any piece of writing – including learning stories – you may or may not have any idea how many hours and drafts went into creating pieces in Te Whāriki that I feel are significant – and am proud of – in relation to my research and the purpose of this blog. If you are a keen and close reader you will recognise some of the key words and phrases 🙂

Firstly, working theories remain alongside learning dispositions as key overarching outcomes for children. Page 23 describes and defines each of these concepts and – most importantly – highlights ways they work in parallel.

“Working theories are the evolving ideas and understandings that children develop as they use their existing knowledge to try to make sense of new experiences. Children are most likely to generate and refine working theories in learning environments where uncertainty is valued, inquiry is modelled, and making meaning is the goal.

Learning dispositions and working theories are closely interwoven. For example, the disposition to be curious involves having the inclination and skills to inquire into and puzzle over ideas and events. These inquiries will often lead to the development of working theories.

Learning dispositions support children to develop, refine and extend working theories as they revisit interests and engage in new experiences. As they gain experience and knowledge, children’s working theories become more connected, applicable and useful and, at times, more creative and imaginative. (p. 23)”

Secondly, working theories are included as one of the 20 learning outcomes designed for more kaiako attention than the previous document’s outcomes. Within the strand of Exploration this is noted as:

“Over time and with guidance and encouragement, children become increasingly capable of … [m]aking sense of their worlds by generating and refining working theories | te rangahau me te mātauranga (p. 47)”

“Making sense”, “generating” and “refining”: such simple words that mean so much in terms of children’s cognitive and affective engagement with their worlds. And this could lead us to so much more we could research about children’s working theories and ways teachers stimulate and respond to sense making efforts. More about that research in future posts.

Technology enables access in ways unheard of 21 years ago with reference to live-streamed sessions and use of websites. It was therefore unsurprising perhaps that the PLD contracts are led by the fabulous CORE-Education team who have led the way in this domain.

Kathy notes that “the updated document is visionary, fresh and engaging and has not lost its core purpose.” She identifies seven key shifts:

deciding what matters

using the learning outcomes

assessment practice

broad and deep curriculum

affirming children’s unique cultural identities

involving parents and whanau

personalised pathways from early learning to school and kura

A few thoughts from me:

Significantly, the document has had a symbolic whāriki (p. 11) gifted to us by a weaver, rather than the kete-like symbol of 1996.

The vision for children remains, but recognises children in the present as well as future as being competent, confident and capable.

“Underpinning Te Whāriki is the vision that children are

competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society. (p. 5)”

Te Tiriti o Waitangi commitments begin the document to highlight the bicultural commitments of the curriculum. The principles, strands and goals remain and stand the test of time in their foresight of being about children’s holistic learning and the skilful and thoughtful role kaiako (our new word for all those who educate children) play in creating and engaging with teaching environments that foster this learning. Whakatauki are used throughout the document to highlight key ideas about children, their families and histories, and important messages and metaphors about learning and teaching. For example:

Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi engari he toa takitini.I come not with my own strengths but bring with me the gifts,talents and strengths of my family, tribe and ancestors. (p. 12)

The most significant change is reducing the learning outcomes from 118 to 20. This is more manageable for teachers to engage with and pay attention to in children’s learning over time. More on these in a future post … to highlight where working theories sit and belong in the new document.

I greatly appreciate, that despite my neglect, many people continue to access this blog and read a range of posts. I hope that this is because the word is slowly spreading in the early childhood community—and beyond—that there are some useful ideas and provocations here for teachers (and perhaps researchers too).

To reorientate you, this blog is about the concept of “working theories”, an innovative learning outcome in the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, that captures the ways children might make sense of their experiences and grow their knowledge and understandings. Throughout, I have referred to the definition that Sarah Jones and I developed:

“Working theories are present from childhood to adulthood. They represent the tentative, evolving ideas and understandings formulated by children (and adults) as they participate in the life of their families, communities, and cultures and engage with others to think, ponder, wonder, and make sense of the world in order to participate more effectively within it. Working theories are the result of cognitive inquiry, developed as children theorise about the world and their experiences. They are also the ongoing means of further cognitive development, because children are able to use their existing (albeit limited) understandings to create a framework for making sense of new experiences and ideas. (p. 36)”

Here’s an opportunity to consider that notion and definition. What kinds of prior ideas, experiences and knowledge might children have brought to the food tasting experiences shared in the following video? The slow motion recording helps us to see their embodied reactions. Observation is such an important skill for teachers to practise when young children cannot express their thinking. In this case it helps is to analyse the kinds of working theories they might be testing out and revising as they explore these tastes and textures…

Do you remember the first time you tasted an olive? Or an anchovy? A new video captures those moments.

Time has flown by! My plans for a monthly blog post have clearly been derailed…

It is twenty years since our internationally-acclaimed early childhood curriculum was released by the Ministry of Education. Its development was remarkable, and included some “flying under the radar” of policy officials (see Sarah Te One’s chapter in Joce Nuttall’s edited book “Weaving Te Whariki” if you are unfamiliar with this story). Since then the sector has largely continued to fly under the radar until the Taskforce report of 2011 and Advisory Group on Early Learning (AGEL) report in 2015 which both recommended a careful look at the ways Te Whariki was being interpreted and used in the sector. The AGEL report also recommended an update and revision of the curriculum.

Earlier this year Nancy Bell was appointed Director of Early Learning at the Ministry (what happened to ECE?) and in July asked for expressions of interest in participating in this update. To cut a long story short I was honoured to be selected to be part of the writing team to update and revise the document – in a relatively short time frame compared to the three years allotted to the original document. As Nancy said, ECE has always had a spirit that tackled tasks head-on. We have met regularly and written and rewritten furiously in between as kaitiaki for this precious taonga. We are fortunate that the original writers and significant others in the sector, along with a range of teachers/kaiako across the country, have provided us with helpful and constructive feedback. The MOE changed a lot from the 1993 draft that lost a lot of the spirit, complexity, context and detail of the 1996 document and we are hopeful we can put this to rights in this revision. Part of my responsibilities in this mission has been to revise early sections of the document. I am of course trying to highlight working theories more explicitly and only time will tell if I have been successful … .

Meantime it’s been wonderful to hear of celebrations around the country for our curriculum document. This post highlights a video made by NZEI, an excellent video apart from one thing – you guessed it! Nothing about working theories and all about learning dispositions. This has prompted me to take a few minutes just before another trip to Wellington for a writers’ hui to post the link and remind us all that:

Attention to children’s working theories – their ideas, critical thinking, and emerging and ongoing meaning making – is the partner to learning dispositions in creating children with strong identities as learners, equipped with the knowledge, skills, strategies, attitudes, expectations and values to take them further in lifelong learning.

I began to wonder what this might mean for early childhood education, including reigniting debates about teachers incorporating any activities involving screen time into their programmes. While use of movies/DVDs might be confined to special occasions, use of the internet and You Tube on both computers and large screens at group times is becoming more common, but presents some dilemmas for teachers.

Core Education is always a great place to go to read about related ideas. An interesting blog post of Karen Spencer’s is:

Comments in this post about the creation of knowledge, the importance of dispositions, and Burch’s “hierarchy of competence” (which you can read more about at https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newISS_96.htm) led me to think more about the concept of intuition.

Earlier I shared Bruner’s (1960) idea about intuition and ways we had applied this to children’s working theories in our project. Bruner indicated that intuition is:

“the intellectual technique of arriving at plausible but tentative formulations without going through the analytic steps by which such formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions. Intuitive thinking, the training of hunches, is a much-neglected and essential feature of productive thinking not only in formal academic disciplines but also in everyday life. A shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion – these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work, whatever his line of work” (pp. 3-4).

Burch’s hierarchy of competence explains how intuition operates at two levels. I often use the analogy of learning to drive a car when explaining working theories and this hierarchy also explains well how we utilise instinctive knowledge, turn that into more formal knowledge and then that this becomes the way we do intuitively judge speed, distance, directions and so on when driving.

Back to Karen’s post, thinking about her questions poses challenges for ECE centres. She asks:

What kinds of literacy learning opportunities are offered at your school, ECE centre or kura – and how do these deliberately teach the skills and competencies to navigate online spaces successfully?

Consider the competencies that you seek to develop with your learners: what do these look like when developed in digital contexts?

To what extent are learning areas explored in ways that invite higher-order engagement, problem-solving and authentic use of technologies? Are learners doing more than searching for information? Are they applying it in ways that are real and connected to the world around us?

This led to me thinking about connections between ECE and schooling again – and in further exploring Core Ed blog posts I located: Seriously, what is school for? |

This post is fascinating for two reasons:

It includes the importance of “hunches” in the related diagram – hunches links well to working theories.

The valued outcomes are social, emotional and dispositional – and therefore connect to ECE well.

We have some data about use of You Tube by teachers that has caused debate. I’ll post about that next time given its topicality related to 21st century learning and learners.

Fundamental to my work on children’s working theories is exploring their interests and inquiries and ways teachers choose whose, which and how to engage with these to create curriculum. I try to encourage teachers – and researchers – to look beyond the surface/obvious and really think about children’s underlying curiosities about life and the world they live in, and the working theories that then arise from these.

This kind of research involves getting as close to the worlds and perspectives of children as possible and trying to interpret these curiosities from a range of evidence from children themselves, families and teachers. As I have commented before, it would be so much easier if we could read children’s minds! It takes many data sources over time to figure out very young children’s interests and inquiries. With 3-5 year olds, it is possible to ask them directly about their interests and see what they say. In both my PhD and in the TLRI we did this to help to corroborate and validate some interpretations, and see what we might have missed to that point.

The idea of children as “life theorizers (Inagaki & Hatano, 2002, p. 126) has been posted earlier. In the TLRI we worked further on this idea. We worked hard together to identify what seemed to matter most to children amongst the themes we found. We realised that the notion of identity was central to their range of inquiries and came up with the following fundamental inquiry as underpinning children’s interests, inquiries and working theories:

How can I build personal, learner, and cultural identities as I participate in interesting, fulfilling, and meaningful activities with my family, community, and culture?

Children’s identities included personal (‘Who am I?’, ‘Who are my parents/family?’, ‘What does it mean to be a girl/boy?’), learner (‘Who am I as a learner?’, ‘What learning strategies can I build here?’, ‘How will teachers help me learn?’), and cultural (‘Where do I come from?’, ‘Who am I as a member of a family/culture/ community?’). The latter incorporated inquiry into a shared national identity (‘What features do “New Zealanders” share?’). These interests and the ways they were expressed served to create a sense of multiple personal and shared identities for the children as members of peer groups, families, and wider communities and cultures.

The questions of importance that followed from this were interpreted as:

Ethics permissions, and principles and practices I value and adhere to, mean that we can’t share any photos or video excerpts on line from our interviews with children. However, I came across the following via Twitter (which despite my misgivings in an early post has turned out to be a great way to keep in touch with many things educational) advertising Story Park which in many ways supports our findings. You may be interested in viewing these excerpts of interviews with children about their interests – and matching them with our ideas:

Recently, I have presented on working theories in Christchurch and Wellington. I have been fortunate to have Daniel Lovatt with me on both occasions, and Niky Veele also in Christchurch. As teacher-researchers, Daniel and Niky also facilitated workshops for teachers about noticing, recognising, responding to, recording and revisiting working theories. In Christchurch I facilitated one on “theories” – as I said there it’s not often an academic gets asked to talk about theory so it was easy to say yes! I used many of the ideas that have been overviewed in this blog.

Thank you to Raewyn Penman and KidsFirst Kindergartens for hosting us in Christchurch and enabling us to share our work with teachers from all over the South Island. Thank you to Judith Loveridge and the Victoria University autumn seminar series team for the opportunity to meet and share with teachers from the greater Wellington area. As we have commented in both places, each time we present and/or write it helps to clarify our thinking a little further. Perhaps some of those teachers may now join in as readers of this blog, continue their discussion and thinking about working theories with their colleagues and inspire their work with children and families further.

I am attaching the edited powerpoint (no videos or photos) from the Wellington keynote to this blog. It will be a bringing together of many ideas already discussed in previous posts.